It’s the end of the year and you want to do some fun classroom activities with your students before you take a break. Now is the perfect opportunity to reflect on the past twelve months and see how much your students have learned. It’s also a good time to revise vocabulary and enjoy practising language without spending a long time on complicated lesson plans.
Here are five quick and easy classroom activities that don’t need a lot of preparation.
1. Reflection road
This fun classroom activity is a wonderful way for students to reflect on their year of learning English.
- Students work individually, in pairs or in small groups.
- Have them draw a road that goes into the distance. The road should be big at the front of the page and become smaller at the top of the page.
- Give students sticky notes and ask them to write how they felt at the beginning of the year or term. You can ask questions to help them with ideas:
How confident did you feel speaking English?
How did you feel about your writing/reading/listening/speaking skills?
How was your pronunciation/vocabulary/grammar?
- Students stick their notes on the distant part of the road. Then, ask learners to think about how they feel now. They repeat the task and stick their new notes on the front of the road. Learners share their journeys with a partner or with the class.
2. Performance Pictionary
This activity is a great way for students to practise and revise language whilst having fun in groups.
- Students work in small groups. Give students a topic you’ve studied through the year, for example, sports or personality adjectives.
- Each student in the group thinks of a word they know from that topic and writes it down. Tell them to make sure nobody else sees the word!
- Students take turns to act or draw their words for their group to guess.
- You can repeat the game several times with different topics. You could also have the class choose their own topics.
3. Class collage
This end-of-year activity is a fantastic way to create a record of the year as a class. It can be done over several lessons.
- This activity aims to create a large picture board of photos or drawings from the year.
- Tell students to collect photos or draw pictures of things they’ve learned throughout the year. For example, if they’ve studied countries and nationalities, they could bring in a picture of a flag. If they’ve studied places in a town, they could draw a picture of their hometown.
- You could also focus on your students’ hobbies and personalities. They bring in photos or draw pictures of things that represent them.
- In the last class, put all of your students’ images together to create a big class collage.
- With higher levels, learners could write descriptions of their images and stick them below each one.
4. Quiz time
This fun classroom activity is led by students, so there’s no need for you to prepare anything.
- During the weeks before the end of the year, put learners into teams and have them write 10–15 quiz questions. They can look through their books and notes to write questions about things they’ve learned during the year. They can also write multiple-choice answer options. Questions should be difficult but not impossible!
- In the final class, teams sit together and take turns reading their questions aloud. Other teams write down their answers.
- Check answers as a class after each round.
- You could give a prize to the winning team, and also for the best team name!
5. Future fun
This activity allows students to look forward to the future and take a break from their studies. Whether it’s summer or winter where you are, they’ll enjoy discussing holidays.
- Put learners into pairs or small groups and have them discuss the things they would like to do during the holidays. These can be realistic ideas or invented ones.
- Be aware that holidays can sometimes be a sensitive topic for some students. If you feel it’s necessary, ask all learners to invent their dream holiday plans.
- Have each group plan short roleplays to show their holiday ideas. They create one roleplay for each member of the group.
- Put groups together and have them take turns acting out each roleplay. The other group must guess whose holiday plan it is.
- Groups collect points for each correct guess. The group with the most points at the end is the winner!
When it comes to doing fun, end-of-year activities consider including activities that reflect on the year, practise language and look to the future like those above.
Do you have any ideas for fun, end-of-year classroom activities?
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For more quick activities, check out 5 Fresh Games For Teaching English – Using Dice!